Historiography

Historiography, the writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particular details from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those details into a narrative that stands the test of critical examination. The term historiography also refers to the theory and history of historical writing.

Modern historians aim to reconstruct a record of human activities and to achieve a more profound understanding of them. This conception of their task is quite recent, dating from the development in the late 18th and early 19th centuries of “scientific” history and the simultaneous rise of history as an academic profession. It springs from an outlook that is very new in human experience: the assumption that the study of history is a natural, inevitable human activity. Before the late 18th century, historiography did not stand at the centre of any civilization. History was almost never an important part of regular education, and it never claimed to provide an interpretation of human life as a whole. This larger ambition was more appropriate to religion, philosophy, and perhaps poetry and other imaginative literature.

History of historiography

All human cultures tell stories about the past. Deeds of ancestors, heroes, gods, or animals sacred to particular peoples were chanted and memorized long before there was any writing with which to record them. Their truth was authenticated by the very fact of their continued repetition. History, which may be defined as an account that purports to be true of events and ways of thinking and feeling in some part of the human past, stems from this archetypal human narrative activity.

While sharing a common ancestry with myth, legend, epic poetry, and the novel, history has of course diverged from these forms. Its claim to truth is based in part on the fact that all the persons or events it describes really existed or occurred at some time in the past. Historians can say nothing about these persons or events that cannot be supported, or at least suggested, by some kind of documentary evidence. Such evidence customarily takes the form of something written, such as a letter, a law, an administrative record, or the account of some previous historian. In addition, historians sometimes create their own evidence by interviewing people. In the 20th century the scope of historical evidence was greatly expanded to include, among many other things, aerial photographs, the rings of trees, old coins, clothes, motion pictures, and houses. Modern historians have determined the age of the Shroud of Turin, which purportedly bears the image of Jesus, through carbon-14 dating and have discredited the claim of Anna Anderson to be the grand duchess Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, through DNA testing

Just as the methods at the disposal of historians have expanded, so have the subjects in they have become interested. Many of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Polynesia, for example, were long dismissed by Europeans as having no precolonial history, because they did not keep written records before the arrival of European explorers. However, sophisticated study of oral traditions, combined with advances in archaeology, has made it possible to discover a good deal about the civilizations and empires that flourished in these regions before European contact.

Historians have also studied new social classes. The earliest histories were mostly stories of disasters—floods, famines, and plagues—or of wars, including the statesmen and generals who figured in them. In the 20th century, however, historians shifted their focus from statesmen and generals to ordinary workers and soldiers. Until relatively recent times, however, most men and virtually all women were excluded from history because they were unable to write. Virtually all that was known about them passed through the filter of the attitudes of literate elites. The challenge of seeing through that filter has been met by historians in various ways. One way is to make use of nontraditional sources—for example, personal documents, such as wills or marriage contracts. Another is to look at the records of localities rather than of central governments.

Through these means even the most oppressed peoples—African-American slaves or medievalheretics, for example—have had at least some of their history restored. Since the 20th century some historians have also become interested in psychological repression—i.e., in attitudes and actions that require psychological insight and even diagnosis to recover and understand. For the first time, the claim of historians to deal with the feelings as well as the thoughts of people in any part of the human past has been made good.

None of this is to say that history writing has assumed a perfect or completed form. It will never do so: examination of its past reveals remarkable changes in historical consciousness rather than steady progress toward the standards of research and writing that represent the best that historians can do today. Nevertheless, 21st-century historians understand the pasts of more people more completely and more accurately than their predecessors did. This article demonstrates the scope of that accomplishment and how it came to be achieved.

Ancient historiography

The first histories

In the beginning was the spoken word. Humans lived for tens of thousands of years with language, and thus with tales about the past, but without writing. Oral history is still important in all parts of the world, and successful transmission of stories over many generations suggests that people without writing can have a sophisticated historical sense. The historical record, however, must start with a system of writing and a suitable writing technology. The earliest forms of writing included cuneiform and pictographs, which were inscribed on stone and clay tablets in Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as Chinese ideograms, which were incised in bronze and on oracle bones (baked oxen bones whose cracks and fissures were thought to foretell the future). People in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China were the first to make records of their contemporaries, which took the form of lists of kings and ancestors.

In Egypt, the first lists date from about the middle of the 3rd millennium bce and extend back another 1,000 years to a time when kings were thought to mingle with gods. Entries were made year by year, making these lists among the earliest annals. In addition to the names of kings, events occasionally are mentioned, especially for the later years; but it is hard to understand on what principle they are included. Sandwiched between notations of offerings to the gods are such enigmatic references as “Smiting of the cave dwellers.” Despite their occasional obscurity, these early historians accomplished the considerable task of organizing the past into units of the same size (years) and assigning events to them.

The king-lists of the Sumerians, the oldest civilization in Mesopotamia, not only presented the order of rulers but described shifts in power as various kings were “smitten with weapons” and overthrown. The Sumerians were also capable of weaving events into a narrative. A Sumerian stela, or standing stone slab, dating from about 2,400 bce records what is probably the world’s first historical narrative. The Stele of the Vultures was erected by the city of Lagash to commemorate its victory in a boundary war with Umma; it contains depictions of warriors in battle gear and an inscription celebrating the triumph.

Sumerian writers seem to have developed their own interpretation of history. This interpretation is reflected in the preoccupation of the king-lists with the transitory nature of royal power and in the Sumerian belief that natural phenomena (notably the behaviour of the Euphrates River) are determined by the gods. Although Sumerian gods could be bungling and cowardly and sometimes even subject to fate, they retained the power to punish humans who offended them. The vicissitudes of kings and states were thought to demonstrate the gods’ power to influence human affairs.

A rich and persistent annalistic tradition and a growing emphasis on history as a repertoire of moral examples characterized the earliest Chinese historiography. The first Chinese historians were apparently temple archivists; as the bureaucratic structure of the Chinese state developed, historians occupied high offices. History gained prestige through the thought of the philosopher Confucius (551–479 bce), who was traditionally—though probably wrongly—credited with writing the Chunqiu (“Spring and Autumn [Annals]”) and the Shujing (“Classic of History”). As articulated in these works, Chinese historical thought was intensely moralistic: virtue was conceived as following the example of one’s ancestors. There was consistent interest in the form of governing institutions and frequent emphasis on the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven—the idea that a monarch ruled by heaven’s decree, which would be withdrawn if he committed evil.

The foundational text of Chinese historiography is the Shiji (“Historical Records”), which was compiled by Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 bce). It is an account of the entire history of China from mythical times through the establishment of the Han dynasty in 206 bce. The story becomes more detailed as Sima Qian approaches his own time and is able to question eyewitnesses of events and make use of abundant official documents. Sima Qian introduced order into the welter of surviving records by organizing them into categories.

The classical Chinese historians made an ideal of objectivity. Although they eschewed interpretation of the historical record, they were often faced with conflicting sources. In such cases they typically chose only one, though they never referred to their sources or explained the choices they made. Historical criticism in China was constrained by propriety because of the high cultural value of ancestors; anything like the contentiousness of the Greeks would have been regarded as most unseemly (see belowGreek historiography).

By about 710 ce, however, Liu Zhiji (661–721) had produced the Shitong (“Historical Perspectives”), the first comprehensive work on historical criticism in any language. For him, the writing of history had an exalted—and very Confucian—mission:

Man lives in his bodily shape between heaven and earth and his life is like the span of the summer fly, like the passing of a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall. Yet he is shamed to think that within those years his merit will not be known…there is truly none who is not tireless in pursuing merit and fame.…Why is this? Because all have their heart set on immortality. And what, then, is immortality? No more than to have one’s name written in a book.

Liu Zhiji’s view had a lasting influence. Indeed, some of his maxims are still recommended to beginning historians: skepticism about the sources, freedom from deference to established scholars, the necessity of extensive knowledge of the sources before selection can be made, and insistence on arguments supported by extensive evidence.

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was as fundamental to Western historiography as the dynastic histories were to Chinese historiography. Although the Bible is many things, it is substantially a work of history. Seventeen of its 39 books are historical, and the 5 major and 12 minor prophets also offer moral interpretations of historical events. Furthermore, references in the Hebrew Bible indicate that annals of the Israelite kings once existed, though they have since been lost.

Moses leading the children of Israel through the Red Sea; illustration from a German Bible, 15th century.Ann Ronan Pictures/Heritage Image/age fotostock

A creation story, an account of a flood that all but destroys humanity, long genealogical lists, a set of laws or commandments, and reflections on the effects of divine wrath on the prosperity of kings and peoples can be found among other Western Asian peoples. Nevertheless, the so-called Yahwist writer (one of the individuals or groups identified as a source of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) possessed a unique conception of history, and the Hebrews identified themselves as a distinct people only because of that conception. They alone had entered into a covenant with Yahweh, who promised Abraham, the first of the Hebrew patriarchs, that his descendants would be as numerous as the sands of the sea. The Hebrews believed that the hand of Yahweh had led them to escape bondage in Egypt and eventually to subdue the peoples of Palestine in order to occupy the Promised Land.

That land was ill-chosen as a peaceful place to live. The Hebrews faced the constant threat of being squeezed between the great powers of the region. About 722 bce the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, and about 598 bce the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians, who carried many Hebrews off to captivity; the Babylonian Exile lasted until 538 bce, when the Persian conquerors of Babylonia allowed the Hebrews to return to Jerusalem. The authors of the Hebrew Bible did not, however, think in geopolitical terms; they tried instead to understand why the promise, which seemed to guarantee earthly success, had apparently been abrogated by Yahweh.

Agonizing over this problem led to something hitherto unknown: a widespread reconception of the historical record. The compilers of the Hebrew scriptures had already rejected the sort of vainglorious boasting characteristic of the records of Babylonian kings. The succession story of King David, for example, does not spare details of his discreditable actions. More serious than any individual sin, however, were the sins committed by the Hebrew people as a whole, who are depicted on occasion as turning away from the worship of Yahweh. It was not unusual to see in the disasters that overwhelmed them the avenging hand of Yahweh, but what required historical reflection was the task of reconciling the apostasy and its punishment with the continuing validity of the promise made to Abraham. Eventually the major prophets, especially Isaiah, reinterpreted the story of their people. Despite the sins and sufferings of the people of Yahweh, the promise had not been invalidated and could even be renewed, because the people’s destiny had not been world power or even a secure kingdom. Instead they had been chosen to suffer as a servant of all of humanity.

This view was distinctive in being a history not merely of a single king or dynasty but of a people. Furthermore, it was not narrowly nationalistic; it extended back to the beginnings of the human race and showed how Yahweh, the Lord of the whole earth, was working out his divine plan for humanity through his promise to the chosen people. Unlike the historical vision of other Western Asian peoples, which had seldom extended far into the past or beyond their own ethnic group, the view of the Hebrews was in principle universal. Since the promise was capable of redefinition and renewal, there was even a rudimentary notion of history as progressive.

One element of modern historical scholarship that does not appear in the works of Western Asian peoples is criticism of sources. Babylonian records often end with elaborate curses against anyone who would seek to alter them. It was the classical Greek historians who first made a systematic attempt to find out what actually happened, rather than to preserve a traditional record of events.

Greek historiography originated in the activities of a group of writers whom the Greeks called logographoi (“logographers”). Logography was the prose compilation of oral traditions relating to the origins of towns, peoples, and places. It combined geographical with cultural information and might be seen as an early form of cultural anthropology. Hecataeus of Miletus, the best known of the logographers, defined his task in his Genealogia (c. 490 bce) as follows: “I write what I consider the truth, for the things the Greeks tell us are in my opinion full of contradictions and worthy to be laughed out of court.” The logographers also served as advocates and speech writers in the courts, and the need to ascertain facts and make arguments clearly influenced their writings.

Although the logographers pioneered in the study of history, their influence was eclipsed by Herodotus, who has been called the “father of history.” His History of the Greco-Persian Wars is the longest extant text in ancient Greek. The fact that it has survived when so many other works written in ancient Greece were lost, including the majority of the plays of the great tragedians (Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles) and much of the corpus of Aristotle), is testimony to the great esteem in which it was held.

Herodotus, detail of a Roman herm probably copied from a Greek original of the first half of the 4th century bce; in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.Courtesy of the Soprintendenza alle Antichità della Campania, Naples

Like the logographers, Herodotus’s approach was historical and anthropological. He questioned the priests at Memphis (in Egypt) and those at Heliopolis and Thebes “expressly to try whether the priests of those places [Heliopolis and Thebes] would agree in their accounts with the priests at Memphis.” He discovered that the Egyptian historical records went much further back than the Greek ones and that Egyptian customs were the reverse of those he knew (which he called “the common practice of mankind”). The Egyptians ate no wheat or barley; kneaded dough with their feet but mixed mud or even dung with their hands; lived with animals; and wrote from right to left. Herodotus also observed that “women attend the markets and trade, while the men sit at home at the loom.”

Although Herodotus also gave ethnographic details of this kind on the Scythians and the Persians, his History possesses a narrative thread, which he announces in the first paragraph: “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.” The “grounds of feud” are traced back beyond the Trojan War (12th or 13th century bce) to a series of abductions of women by both Europeans and Asians. The Greeks made themselves enemies of Persia (which claimed all of Asia) when they led an army to besiege the Anatolian city of Troy to recover Helen, the Greek woman kidnapped by the Trojan prince Paris. The rivalry was renewed in the time of the Persian king Xerxes, leading to an epic conflict between the enormous forces of Persia and those of Athens, Sparta, and most, though not all, of the other Greek city-states. The pattern of a nemesis upon the hubris of the Persians is obvious.

Despite his apparently conscientious questioning of his witnesses, Herodotus developed a reputation for credulity. However, although he was certainly not one to resist a good story, he did not endorse everything he reported. He described a story that the Greeks told about the mythical hero Heracles as a “silly fable” that reflected badly on their critical sense. In the tradition of the logographers, he believed that his duty was to record the traditions of various peoples, no matter how dubious. He combined a remarkable narrative artistry with an effort to discern the causes of customs and events.

The most famous critic—and emulator—of Herodotus was Thucydides (flourished 5th century bce). Whereas Herodotus had hoped to preserve the glory of Greeks and barbarians from the destruction of time, Thucydides had little glory to celebrate. In his great work, the History of the Peloponnesian War, which describes the destructive conflict (431–404 bce) between Athens and Sparta, Thucydides aimed “not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions.” When reporting on events that he did not personally witness, he carefully checked the reports of eyewitnesses, bearing in mind their partiality and imperfect memories. “It may be,” he concedes,

that my history will be less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events that happened in the past and that (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public but was done to last forever.

Behind this veiled criticism of Herodotus is the ambition to establish a diagnostic science of history. Just as Thucydides describes the symptoms of plague in Athens, so he clinically notes the degeneration of the Athenian body politic. The city’s highest ideals are articulated in the funeral oration that Thucydides attributes to the Athenian leader Pericles; its realpolitik is brutally illustrated in the city’s treatment of the inhabitants of the island of Melos. In the famous “Melian Dialogue,” the Athenians demand that the hitherto neutral Melians join their confederation. They offer no justification of their demand beyond their power to enforce it, warning the Melians against having any hope in portents or oracles. When the Melians refuse, the Athenians send a force so strong that the Melians surrender unconditionally, whereupon the Athenians massacre all the men of military age and sell the women and children into slavery.

The pathology of the Athenians is most clearly manifested in their disastrous expedition to Sicily. Persuaded by demagogues and by soothsayers and oracles that they will prevail, the Athenians attack the island and its chief city, Syracuse, without realizing that they are undertaking a war almost as demanding as that still under way against Sparta. The expedition goes badly: the entire Athenian army is killed or captured and the prisoners confined to quarries, where “they suffered everything which one could imagine might be suffered by men imprisoned in such a place.” “To the victors,” wrote Thucydides, the Sicilian expedition was “the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats; for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total: army, navy, everything was destroyed.”

The lessons taught by Thucydides have not lost their timeliness, and his project for a scientific history has been taken up again and again. As a historian, he was true to the central presupposition of Greek philosophy, that the truest knowledge must be of the unchanging. Asserting his belief that human nature is “what it is,” he warned that the situations he described would arise repeatedly and expressed his hope that his analysis would prove useful to future statesmen.

One of the puzzles in the history of historiography is why the brilliant beginnings of the Greek tradition exhausted themselves. Herodotus and Thucydides had no successors, only continuators who tried to bridge the chronological gap between the two historians or to continue the story beyond the end of Thucydides’ texts. These efforts barely rose above the levels of annals, and the authors showed neither the critical skill nor the literary power of their great predecessors. Xenophon (c. 430–350 bce) was among those who attempted a continuation, but his more valuable contributions were in biography. Although history writing was still done in the Hellenistic Age (323 bce–330 ce), there was little improvement.

The Romans inherited Greek historiography as they inherited other elements of Greek culture, aware of its prestige and emulating it in some ways but inevitably giving it the imprint of their quite different temperament. Fittingly, it was a Greek writing in Greek, Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 bce), who first offered key insights into the development of the Roman state and discussed aspects of Roman society that the Romans themselves had hardly noticed. He asked: “Can anyone be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the domination of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite 53 years?” In answering this question, Polybius drew comparisons between the Romans and the Greeks, the latter of whom failed to forge a lasting empire, even under Alexander the Great (356–323 bce). The primary reason for Rome’s success, according to Polybius, was the Roman character, as reflected in statesmanship, public spirit, and moderation toward defeated peoples.

Polybius also argued that Roman political institutions were superior to Greek ones. He accepted the theory of the cyclical degeneration and regeneration of Greek city-states, which had been elaborated by Aristotle. This theory maintained that city-states develop first as despotisms and evolve through periods of monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and finally mob rule before the restoration of order in a new despotism. There was, however, nothing inevitable about this cycle, and Polybius at one time believed that the Romans might avert it because the constitution of the Roman Republic was mixed, allowing for some monarchical and some popular elements as well as the aristocracy of the Senate. (This theory of the benefits of mixed government was to have a long career.) Finally, Polybius believed the Romans had been favoured by Tyche (“fate” or “fortune”), which was partly responsible for drawing the world under Roman rule.

Like Thucydides, Polybius relied on personal experience and the cross-examination of eyewitnesses. Thus, he retraced the route of the Carthaginian general Hannibal across the Alps and observed the siege of Carthage in 146 bce. Although he scorned historians who merely sat in their studies, he also condemned petty histories of small corners of the world. To the contrary, the triumph of Rome called for a universal history: “Up to this time the world’s history had been, so to speak, a series of disconnected transactions.…But from this time forth History becomes a connected whole: the affairs of Italy and Libya are involved with those of Asia and Greece, and the tendency of all is to unity.”

Unfortunately, a method based on personal experience and eyewitness accounts could capture a moment of decisive conquest but could not yield universal history. It remained for Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century bce to come closest, among ancient writers, to this ideal. Diodorus traced to 60 bce the histories of Arabs, Assyrians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Indians, Romans, and Scythians—not to mention Amazons and the residents of Atlantis. He is one of the main ancient supporters of the claim that Plato and other Greek thinkers learned their wisdom from the Egyptians.

Less than a century after Polybius explained the rise of the Roman state, Roman historians were beginning to speak of its decline. Sallust (c. 86–c. 35/34 bce) described the conspiracy of the Roman patrician Catiline in the Bellum Catilinae (43–42 bce; Catiline’s War), and his Bellum Jugurthinum (41–40 bce; The Jugurthine War) focused on the war against Jugurtha, the king of Numida (roughly present-day Algeria). The lesson of both was that the republic was rotting inwardly through corruption and the arrogance of power. Indeed, in Sallust’s systematic analysis Rome was shown to be suffering the general fate of empires.

Livy (59/64 bce–17 ce), one of the greatest Roman historians, lived through the fall of the republic and the establishment of the principate by Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Like Sallust, Livy was inclined to idealize the severe virtues of republican Rome. His monumental history, most of which has not survived, starts with the founding of the city and extends into the rule of Augustus. Like the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil, Livy’s work served to memorialize Rome’s early history just as the republic was being transformed into an empire.

Nobody was more aware of this development, or decline, than Tacitus (56–120). His two great works—the Annals, which covers the years 14–68 ce, and the Histories, which begins with the famous “year of the four emperors” (69 ce) and ends with the death of the emperor Domitian (96)—provide an important account of the first century of the principate. Tacitus was a self-conscious stylist, and in his treatise on style he claimed that styles were themselves the product of historical changes rather than being entirely the decision of the historian. His own writing is perhaps most remarkable for his concise epigrams. Of the short-lived reign of the emperor Galba, for example, Tacitus wrote: “Capax imperium, nisi imperasset” (“He would have been capable of ruling, except that he ruled”). And concerning Roman methods of pacification, he observed, “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant” (“They have made a desert and call it peace”).

Politics, as it had been known in the republic, no longer existed; the intrigues of the imperial family and of its bodyguard, the Praetorian Guard, determined the fate of Rome. Instead of creating a master narrative about the impersonal forces that might have led to this development, as Polybius or even Sallust might have done, Tacitus focused on the character of the various emperors. As was typical of ancient authors, he had no conception of character as developing through the course of a lifetime. Innate character, however, reveals itself fully only in crises, or when the possession of absolute power allows all its latent features to emerge—as with the vanity and cruelty of Nero. Tacitus’s emphasis upon character, despite the crudity of his psychological theories, made him a pioneer of psychohistory. It also brought the form of historical works close to that of multiple biographies.

This is even more true of the De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars), written by Suetonius in the 2nd century. His treatments consist of an account of each emperor’s administrative and military accomplishments followed by a description of his character and personal life. Although Suetonius, a former imperial secretary, drew upon the imperial archives in composing his Lives, the work is best known for the scandalous details it provides regarding the private lives of the emperors. In this he differed from the best-known of the ancient biographers, Plutarch, whose Bioi paralloi (Parallel Lives) juxtaposed the life stories of 24 Romans and 24 Greeks who had faced similar experiences. His purpose was to draw moral lessons from the lives of these figures. If they responded differently to their challenges, it was partly a consequence of character, but weaknesses of character could—and should—be overcome by a strenuous exercise of virtue.

Despite its origins in Greek historical thought, Roman historiography was in many ways more like Chinese than Greek historiography. The Romans lacked the speculative interests of the Greeks, and their historians made little effort to propound grand or even middle-range theories. This is one reason why they were content for so long with the annalistic form. The Romans of the republic had scarcely less regard for their ancestors than the Chinese did, and both believed that histories should propound moral lessons. Indeed, this was one of the Roman legacies to medieval Christian historiography.

Medieval historiography

The earliest Christians thought that history was about to end, because Jesus had said that some of his disciples would still be alive at his Second Coming. Fired with such apocalyptic expectations, all they needed to know of history was that God had broken into it through the Incarnation and that Jesus had conquered death through the Resurrection. Thus, it was hardly inevitable that Christians would develop an interest in history, much less their own philosophy of history. But the authors of the canonicalGospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative and reinterpreted it to accord with the new revelation. In their view many prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures referred to Jesus, and many of its stories prefigured his life (thus, Jonah’s three-day sojourn in the belly of the great fish was a foreshadowing of the Resurrection).

St. Mark, illuminated manuscript page from the Gospel Book of the Court school of Charlemagne, c. 810; in the Statsbibliothek, Trier, Ger. Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Ger.

Incorporation of the Hebrew Bible into the Christian canon helped to shape the Christian conception of history. By tracing their history to Adam and Eve and the other figures who preceded Abraham, Christians encompassed all of humanity within their worldview. Reflecting the influence of the Hebrew prophets, the early Christians held that sins were inevitably followed by divine punishment and that the plot of history was the unfolding of God’s will for humanity. Disasters represented punishment for sins; prosperity indicated divine favour to faithful humans. Thus, nothing could happen that could not be explained by the providential interpretation of history.

Nevertheless, the idea of providence did not instantly solve all historical problems, some of which were peculiar to Christianity. In particular, what was the place of the Roman Empire in the divine plan? For almost three centuries Christians provoked in Roman authorities puzzlement, exasperation, and intermittent persecution. For their part, Christians treated the empire as at best irrelevant and at worst (as in the Revelation to John) as one of the beasts of the apocalypse. But with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christian historians had to come to terms with the historical significance of a Christian emperor. The challenge was met by Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) was the first important work of Christian history since the Acts of the Apostles. For Eusebius, the Roman Empire was the divinely appointed and necessary milieu for the propagation of the Christian faith. Roman peace and Roman roads allowed the Apostle Paul to travel tens of thousands of miles on his evangelical journeys, and now Constantine had been appointed to end the persecution of Christians.

The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 posed a severe challenge to Eusebius’s interpretation of history. The most famous response was the monumental De civitate Dei contra paganos (413–426/427; City of God) of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was forced to confront the argument that the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome had led to the downfall of the empire. His rebuttal dissolved the identity of empire and Christianity. Humanity was composed of two cities, inextricably mixed: the earthly, built on self-love, and the heavenly, animated by the love of God. Only at the Last Judgment would the two be separated. Whatever human glory (or disaster) might attend the earthly city paled in significance compared to the denouement awaiting the heavenly city. Although this vast work (Isidore of Sevilla [c. 560–636] said that anyone who claimed to have read all of it was lying) had great influence, especially in periodizing history, it offered little help to historians who wished to write about the affairs of the earthly city.

The issue of periodization was vital. Augustine divided history into six ages, comparable to the six ages of the individual human life span: from Adam and Eve to the biblical Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Jesus, and from Jesus to the Second Coming. Augustine’s disciplePaulus Orosius complicated this scheme by introducing apocalyptic material from the Book of Daniel, which was construed as prophesying four kingdoms, the last of which was the Roman Empire. The end of this kingdom would be the end of the world.

The fall of the Roman Empire actually resulted from the successful attempt of Germanic peoples to occupy its lands and enjoy its benefits. Goths, Lombards, Franks, and other Germanic peoples carved out new kingdoms from the moribund Western empire and adopted its traditions and even its identity. Yet there were difficulties in fitting the Germanic invaders into this pattern. They were nonliterate and preserved their memories of the past orally in heroic poems such as Beowulf. Historical writing was almost all done by clerics, in Latin. Gregory of Tours (538/539–594), for example, wrote Ten Books of Histories, a history of the Franks from the perspective of the old Gallo-Roman aristocracy, and St. Bede the Venerable (672/673–735) composed the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People). For both authors, the invaders, once converted to orthodox (Roman) Christianity, were instrumental in repressing heresy: the Franks opposed Arianism (which held that Christ was not divine but created), and the Anglo-Saxons suppressed the irregular practices of the Celtic church.

Although Gregory and Bede wrote histories, early medieval historiography typically took one of two other forms: chronicles and hagiographies, or lives of saints. The spare nature of the earliest chronicles is illustrated by the following excerpt from the chronicle of St. Gall monastery in Switzerland:

720 Charles fought against the Saxons.

721 Theudo drove the Saxons out of Aquitaine.

722 Great crops.

723 724 No entries.

725 Saracens came for the first time.

726 727 728 729 730 No entries.

731 Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.

732 Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.

Even this rudimentary example, however, exhibits typical characteristics of early medieval chronicles. Only events—human deeds and natural prodigies—are listed. There is no effort to show any causal relationship between them—its style is what rhetoricians call “paratactic” (typically, clauses are simply connected by “and”) rather than “hypotactic” (when subordinate conjunctions such as “since” or “therefore” show some sort of relationship between clauses). Although history is presented only in terms of human actions, the absence of causal language makes agency appear limited. Bizarre occurrences in nature are included merely as oddities. For the early medieval chroniclers, the cosmos was bound up in a network of resemblances: bestiaries praised animals for their quasi-human virtues (e.g., elephants for chastity and bees for industry) and plants owed healing powers to their likeness to parts of the body (walnuts were eaten for disorders of the brain). It was therefore significant when fountains oozed blood or clouds assumed symbolic shapes, since they were indications of the divine will.

Chronicles became richer in the later Middle Ages. They proved to be invaluable resources to later historians, especially in cases in which the chronicler had personal knowledge of the events recorded. The Greater Chronicle of Matthew Paris (died 1259) marks the culmination of the chronicle tradition. Indeed, it seemed so comprehensive that virtually all subsequent English chroniclers confined themselves to copying it. Paris made only one trip outside England and spent most of his time in the monastery of St. Albans. Yet he was well-informed about Western European as well as English history. He seems to have acquired this knowledge partly through his access to a vast number of previous chronicles and state papers and partly through his interaction with the many visitors who stayed at the monastery, including friars who had traveled on the continent. Paris combined his comprehensive knowledge with a lively writing style, which was modeled in some ways on classical historians (for example, he used invented speeches).

Reporting what actually happened was not necessarily the primary goal of even the best chroniclers. Emulation or imitation was valued, and criticism of sources was usually subordinated to copying. Nevertheless, changes in consciousness gradually developed as the Middle Ages wore on. Hagiographies increasingly began to resemble modern biographies, as their writers took more interest in the individuality and development of their characters. The chronicle form disappeared in the 15th century.

As chroniclers recognized human actions, rather than impersonal forces, as the stuff of history, it is not surprising that biography flourished, especially hagiography, or saints’ lives. The genre conventionally included details of the saint’s childhood, the miracles he performed, and his eventual martyrdom. Understanding of individual character was much less important than the moral lessons and encouragement conveyed by the story.

New forms

Two writers who in very different ways pointed to new forms of historiography were Otto of Freising (c. 1111–58) and Geoffrey of Villehardouin (c. 1150–c. 1213). Otto, the uncle of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, had received the best education available in his time, which meant studying dialectic and theology in Paris (perhaps under the theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard). Because history was not regularly taught in medieval schools or universities, it is not surprising that Otto adopted a more philosophical approach in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (“Chronicle or History of the Two Cities”). As its title indicates, the work was inspired by Augustine. Beginning, as many chronicles did, with the Creation and ending in 1146, it reflects abundantly on the miseries of “wars and tottering kingdoms.” Otto, like Orosius, identified the City of God with the church. Yet the Chronicle deals with ecclesiastical affairs with remarkable objectivity, considering Otto’s kinship with the German emperors. He describes the Investiture Controversy between the German ruler Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII and states arguments both for and against the so-called Donation of Constantine (an 8th-century forgery that came to be the basis for papal claims to temporal power). Although he prudently avoids giving unnecessary offense, he defends writing that might anger his predecessors, because “it is better to fall into the hands of men than to abandon the function of a historian by covering up a loathsome sight by colours that conceal the truth.”

Otto participated in the Second Crusade (1146–48) but did not write about it. The Crusades raised interpretative problems that historians had not faced before. Because nothing like the Crusades had ever happened, they posed new issues of historical causality. They brought Europeans into massive—though not invariably hostile—contact with Islamic civilization, and they inspired new kinds of historical writing. Villehardouin, a French nobleman and military commander, was an eyewitness of the Fourth Crusade (1201–04). His Conquête de Constantinople (The Conquest of Constantinople) was the first sustained work of French prose and one of the first great memoirs in French.

Precisely because Villehardouin did not know how histories “ought” to be written, however, his work lacked the conventional preface modestly declaring the author’s lack of ability. His history is basically the memoir of a successful commander. It is free of the moral reflections beloved of monks and the rhetorical effusions indulged in by emulators of the Latin historians. With Villehardouin a new voice—vivacious, conventionally pious but impatient of theological niceties, and keenly interested in military and political strategies—entered historical discourse.

The Qurʾān, the sacred text of Islam, contains allusions that constitute the basis of a providential history of humankind from Adam through Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Another valuable resource for Islamic historians is the Hadith (the traditions or sayings of Muhammad), which is arranged in such a way that lines of transmission can be traced back to those who knew the Prophet. Chains of authorities were thus integral to early Islamic theology and historiography, which naturally lent themselves to annalistic treatment.

The greatest early Islamic historian, al-Ṭabarī (839–923), was reputed to have memorized the Qurʾān at the age of seven. Legend credited him with producing a 30,000-page commentary on the Qurʾān and an equally long universal history (both survive but are only one-tenth as long). His chief virtues as a historian were his accurate chronology and his scrupulous faithfulness in reproducing authorities. Like Christian annalists, he depended on the Hebrew Bible (as interpreted by Islam), though the world he inhabited was basically Egypt and Muslim Asia rather than Western Christendom. The Persian scholar Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318) composed a more truly universal history, Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh (“Collector of Chronicles”), which covered not only the Islamic world (which by then extended from Spain to northern India) but also included data on the popes and emperors of Europe and on Mongolia and China.

The sophistication of Islamic historical thought was dramatically illustrated by the Muqaddimah (“Introduction”) of the Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406). This introductory volume of a universal history reveals Khaldūn’s ideas about history—something chroniclers hardly ever did. The subjects Khaldūn considered in his work include historical method, geography, culture, economics, public finance, population, society and state, religion and politics, and the social context of knowledge. Khaldūn held high office and was often exiled or imprisoned. Late in his life he had the opportunity to discuss history with the Mongol emperor Timur the Lame, who was besieging Damascus. Timur wrote his own memoirs, and he was evidently interested not only in what Khaldūn knew about North Africa but also in his philosophy of history.

Khaldūn lived with the Bedouins of North Africa and in the sophisticated Muslim cities of Granada and Cairo. These experiences were the source of one of his main ideas: that humans first lived in Bedouin tribes and then achieved civilization, but civilization became decadent with increasing wealth and luxury. No dynasty or civilization, he believed, could maintain vitality for more than four generations (though the only example he gives is the decline of the Israelites after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph). Khaldūn contrasted his writing with “surface history,” which was “no more than information about political events” and was used to “entertain large, crowded gatherings.” Historians of his day, he thought, were too credulous in accepting tradition. As for their frequent moralizing about the misconduct of certain caliphs, Khaldūn asserted that people like to justify their own misconduct by looking in histories for examples of the great who have done the same things. To reach the “inner meaning” of history, the historian had to be “speculative” and give “subtle explanations” of causes. To accomplish this, history had to be rooted in philosophy—or, as Khaldūn said of his own work, it had to be a new and original science.

In the 12th century, Europeans took an avid interest in the Arabic translations and commentaries on Greek medical, mathematical, and, especially, philosophical works. By the time of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), this interest had waned, and his work would influence only later European historians. The idea of history as a new science, however, would have a long career, beginning with some historians of the Renaissance.

The nature, origins, and even existence of the Renaissance has been subject to intensive investigation since the early 20th century. The term has been applied to cultural movements in the 9th and 12th centuries, and medieval precedents have been identified for developments that were previously thought to be unique to the Renaissance. This is as true for historiography as for any other aspect of Renaissance culture; but while the differences between the Renaissance and the earlier Middle Ages may have been exaggerated, they do exist. Nobody could mistake a historian such as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) for Matthew Paris (died 1259).

Although he was not exactly a historian, the Italian scholar and poet Petrarch (1304–74) illustrates much that was distinctive about the Renaissance attitude toward history. If not the first to coin the term Middle Ages, he consistently held that his own age (subsequently to be called the Renaissance) had made a decisive break with the 10 centuries that followed the decline of the Roman Empire. His true contemporaries, he thought, were the historians and poets of Rome’s Golden Age (c. 70 bce–18 ce), to whom he addressed a series of letters, Epistolae metricae (begun 1350). The letter to Livy expresses Plutarch’s wish that he had been born in Livy’s time or Livy in his; thanks him for transporting Petrarch into the company of the worthies of ancient Rome instead of “the thievish company of today among whom I was born under an evil star”; and concludes: “Farewell forever, matchless historian!…Written…in the thirteen hundred and fiftieth year from the birth of Him whom you would have seen, or of whose birth you could have heard, had you lived a little longer.”

Medieval historians knew that Livy and the poet Ovid were not Christians (though they sometimes described people hearing mass before the birth of Jesus). Yet, in general they had little understanding of the radical differences between their society and that of the Romans. They conceived of Hector and Achilles as knights like Roland or Lancelot, depicting them in full medieval armour. Petrarch, at least, had an appreciation of the discontinuity between past and present, as well as a painful sense of his own anachronism. For him, all aspects of a culture were in constant change. Petrarch also exhibited an antiquarian interest that would eventually enrich the study of history. He attempted, for example, to reconstruct imaginatively what early Rome looked like.

Renaissance humanists were above all philologists, rhetoricians, and editors and emulators of the texts of Latin (and later Greek) antiquity. One of their triumphs was the demonstration by Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) that the so-called Donation of Constantine could not have been authentic. This document had been suspect, on various grounds, for centuries; Valla’s argument was distinguished by his proof that its Latin style and diction belonged to the 8th century and not the 4th. With similar philological arguments Petrarch discredited a charter exempting Austria from imperial jurisdiction. Two other famous documents, the Isidorian Decretals (also known as the False Decretals) and the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, eventually earned the prefix pseudo through Renaissance scholarship.

Antiquarians such as Petrarch were interested in all sorts of relics of the past, material objects as well as texts—an interest that eventually led to social and economic history and even to “everyday history” and “history from below.” In his works on Roman antiquities Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) virtually founded the field of archaeology. His Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades (“Decades of History From the Deterioration of the Roman Empire”), for example, introduced the concept of the decline of the Roman Empire and the idea of the Middle Ages as the period from 410 to 1410. In addition, he used the new textual criticism to eliminate many legends that had been accepted as facts in previous histories.

Biondo, however, was not what his contemporaries called a “pure historian.” The model of pure history was the Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (“Twelve Books of Histories of the Florentine People”), by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444). Although Bruni owed much to the chronicles kept by the Italian cities, he drew extensively from ancient historians and, having learned Greek, was one of the first Europeans since ancient times to read Thucydides. Bruni was greatly influenced by Livy, who provided the paradigmatic account of how a city is founded and becomes great. Bruni scrupulously (though not slavishly) followed Livy’s example in his emphasis on politics—he found nothing worth relating for the year 1348, when the Black Death first struck Florence—and on individual character as the cause of historical actions. He also restricted himself to the vocabulary that Livy used or could have used.

Bruni’s central theme was the people of Florence. His history followed a strong narrative line that described the rise to power of the Florentines and their victory in their war against Milan, which Bruni believed was made possible by republican virtue, or civic humanism. That same pride continued to animate other Florentine historians, even the apparently cynical Machiavelli.

Whereas Bruni had written at the apex of Florentine power, Machiavelli’s public career was marked by the desperate situation created by what he called “the calamity”: the invasion of Italy first by the French in 1494 and later by the imperial forces of Charles V in 1527. As a diplomat and later secretary to Florence’s ruling Council of Ten, Machiavelli observed and tried to influence the shifting alliances between the Italian city-states. When the Medici family returned to power and ousted him from office, he turned to reflections on politics and history. In addition to Il principe (1532; The Prince), his most famous work, he wrote the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (1531; Discourses on Livy), the Istorie Fiorentine (1532; Florentine Histories), and Dell’arte della guerra (1521; The Art of War). Machiavelli presented his thoughts on history as “a new route” that would provide instruction to the statesmen of his day by marshaling examples from ancient history. As he writes in the Discourses on Livy,

Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples are and ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or, not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of the events.

History thus would become political science. Machiavelli, however, did not always respect his data in cases in which the historical situation did not lend itself to the maxim of statecraft he was trying to inculcate.

Machiavelli’s younger contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) shared some of Machiavelli’s attitudes but not his rationale for studying history. “It is most fallacious,” he wrote, “to judge by examples; because unless these be in all respects parallel they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest possible divergence in the conclusions.” Instead, in his Storia d’Italia (1537–40; “History of Italy”), Guicciardini attempted to explain why Italy had been unable to resist foreign incursions. Writing the history of such a diverse area was itself an innovation, for which Guicciardini’s diplomatic experience served him well; but he also drew from the repertoire of classical historians the technique of the character, or psychological, sketch of the leading actors. Since Guicciardini, like almost all Renaissance historians, believed that historical change resulted from the virtù (or lack of it) of individuals, the ability to draw a brilliant character—at which he excelled—enhanced the explanatory power of his work.

It is thus not surprising that biographies flourished in the Renaissance. Some were of individuals, but a more typical genre was multiple biographies. Petrarch, again, was a pioneer with his De viris illustribus (begun 1338; Illustrious Men). A still more famous example was Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550; Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), by Giorgio Vasari. Vasari did not simply compile a series of biographical sketches; he grouped them into three periods, which were marked by a progressive improvement in artistic technique. He concluded that “it is inherent in the very nature of these arts to progress step by step from modest beginnings, and finally to reach the summit of perfection.” He noted that in his own day “art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature, and has progressed so far that it has more reason to fear slipping back than to expect ever to make further advances.” This last clause hints at the belief in historical cycles which was common in Renaissance thought. Vasari acknowledged that the arts of the ancients had also risen and then declined.

Self-portrait by Giorgio Vasari, oil on canvas; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.SCALA/Art Resource, New York

It is easy to make the Renaissance too modern. It was an era in which beliefs in magic and in numerology had wide currency. It is also possible to exaggerate the level of interest in history during this period. Thus, the archetypal “Renaissance man,” Leonardo da Vinci, seems to have had little interest in acquiring historical knowledge. Renaissance humanists, however, made positive contributions to the study of history, and the humanist approach to the past helped to create the great upheaval of the Reformation.

Early modern historiography

Church history

Martin Luther (1483–1546), the German theologian who set the Reformation in motion, at first glance bears little resemblance to Petrarch, much less to Machiavelli. But while his piety was intense, he embraced much of the new learning. Nobody was more insistent on returning to the sources, which for him meant the New Testament. Any belief or practice not found there, he thought, must be a human invention, introduced during the long period of papal perversion of the Christian faith.

Portrait of Martin Luther, oil on panel by Lucas Cranach, 1529; in the Uffizi, Florence.Photos.com/Thinkstock

Protestantism thus entailed a reinterpretation of church history as well as of the Bible. As a consequence, history, which was not part of the curriculum in medieval universities, came to be taught in Protestant ones. (The early association of history and German universities became important later.) Luther’s followers also set about publishing their version of church history. Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) published a manuscript of Valla’s treatise on the Donation of Constantine, impudently dedicating it to the pope. A team of scholars (a novelty) toured Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and Austria looking for documents on which to base their Centuriae Magdeburgenses (1559–75; “Magdeburg Centuries”), a 13-volume work that constituted a denunciation of the course of church history up to 1300. The Centuriae Magdeburgenses was in some ways regressive; the compilers could not think of any more satisfactory arrangement for their material than by centuries, and their credulity toward documents damaging to the papacy was as invariable as the critical acumen they deployed to discredit every basis of papal authority. Nevertheless, they unearthed large quantities of data. The Centuriae Magdeburgenses called forth an equally voluminous and tendentious Roman Catholic response, the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical Annals”), by Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), also in 13 volumes and also organized by centuries. This in turn was refuted by Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), who was outraged that Baronius had attempted to write ecclesiastical history without knowing either ancient Greek or Hebrew.

One great work that emerged from this era of often tedious controversy was Paolo Sarpi’s Istoria del Concilio Tridentino (1619; History of the Council of Trent). Sarpi, whose range of interests and accomplishments rivaled those of da Vinci, knew Greek and Hebrew and was able to do extensive historical research and to mold the results into a compelling literary form. Sarpi was a friar and, by his lights, a loyal Catholic, but he was also a loyal Venetian and hence an opponent of the temporal powers of the pope. He understood that the Council of Trent (1545–63) had quashed the last hope of reuniting Christendom. In its attack on the Jesuits, the guardians of Roman Catholic theological orthodoxy, the History demonstrated a mastery of irony, sarcasm, and ridicule that was not approached again until Les Provinciales, by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62). Despite its errors and biases, it remains a masterpiece of Italian prose. And, like the controversy between Baronius and the authors of the Centuriae Magdeburgenses, it stimulated the publication of many additional sources for the study of medieval history.

Sarpi’s work closed an epoch in Italian historiography. In the late 16th and 17th centuries France became the centre of historiographical innovation, which was applied now to the history of law. This field became almost as contentious as the history of religion but was ultimately more fruitful, since it opened lines of inquiry that eventually led to modern conceptions of history.

Legal history

France was the earliest beneficiary of the rise of Italian humanistic scholarship, but it differed from Italy in ways that facilitated fruitful extension of the new learning. The Protestant stimulus to historiography was much stronger in France, and there was also no inquisition or Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: “Index of Prohibited Books”) to suppress free inquiry. Whereas Italian humanists tended to regard the Middle Ages as an embarrassing interlude between the glories of ancient Rome and their own time, France had been the intellectual centre of Europe during that period. Furthermore, any serious treatment of medieval history required sorting out Germanic elements from Roman ones, a problem that the French were better able to undertake.

Throughout the Middle Ages the Code of Justinian, or Corpus Juris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”), the four-volume codification of Roman law compiled under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (483–565), was regarded as the quintessence of human law, applicable in virtually every situation. Parts of it were contradictory or barely intelligible, but commentators regarded these difficulties as the result of their own hermeneutic ineptitude. In the 15th century, however, humanists (among them Lorenzo Valla) assumed instead that the text had been corrupted by its compilers and that its pure form could be recovered through the application of philological methods. In France, Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) followed Valla’s example, and his commentary on the Pandects, the second volume of Justinian’s code, established the power of this approach. Budé’s commentary and his book on the economic history of the Roman Empire earned him a scholarly prestige comparable to that of the great Dutch humanist Erasmus.

The effort to recover the pure text of Justinian’s code required both sensitivity to linguistic change and the ability to establish the historical context in which the Pandects were compiled. These became the hallmarks of the so-called “French mode” of legal studies, which ousted the unhistorical “Italian mode” from most French universities within a single generation. The more radical implications of the French approach, however, remained to be revealed. If the Code of Justinian was a jumble of republican and imperial law, as the French school held, then, as François Hotman (1524–90) concluded, the laws of Rome were irrelevant to those of France. This conclusion was of more than antiquarian import, since Hotman attributed tendencies toward absolutism in the French monarchy to the influence of Roman law; the monarchy of the Franks, in his view, was more limited.

François Baudouin and Jean Bodin

Although the new study of law was closely related to historiography, the early commentaries on civil law did not constitute histories. The two disciplines were married in theory in Institution of Universal History and its Connection with Jurisprudence by François Baudouin (1520–73) and the Method for the Easy Understanding of History by Jean Bodin (1530–96). These two works belonged to an extremely popular genre, the ars historica (“art of history”). Baudouin’s work, though repeating all the old commonplaces about the virtues of history, was also a handbook—perhaps the first—of historical method. Acknowledging that rhetoric is history’s mother and political science its sister, Baudouin declared that history ought to narrate and explain historical events themselves, as well as their causes and consequences. To establish historical truth, the historian should rely on eyewitness accounts, or, lacking these, primary sources. Although history was partly geographic in scope, it required also, in principle, attention to all human culture (for Baudouin this meant ecclesiastical as well as political and military history).

Bodin’s book shared many of Baudouin’s ideas. Although Bodin placed history “above all sciences,” he actually wished to extract from it the materials for a transcendentpolitical philosophy and a universal jurisprudence. He attempted this in Les Six Livres de la République (1576; “The Six Books of the Commonwealth”).

The union of historiographical theory and practice was best achieved by Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615) in his Recherches de la France (1560–1621), which may be regarded as the first work of modern history. Pasquier denied that medieval chronicles were “authorities,” instead regarding them as raw materials or primary sources, no more credible than law codes or even folk traditions. Medieval French chronicles usually began the story of the French people by tracing their descent from some hero of the Trojan War. Although these stories had lost credibility, no convincing alternative had been developed. Pasquier began his story with the Gauls, and, since the chronicles said almost nothing about them, he reconstructed their history from comments in Julius Caesar’s De bello Gallico (Gallic Wars). He read Caesar just as critically as any chronicle, however, reversing the Roman leader’s negative value judgments where appropriate and wringing from the texts a picture that Caesar supplies almost in spite of himself.

Pasquier’s ability to recognize and utilize the best historical sources available is also demonstrated in his treatment of Joan of Arc, the peasant who led French armies against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Not yet an enormous cult figure, Joan was treated in many chronicles as an intriguer and impostor or, even worse, a witch or heretic. Yet the records of her trial, which allow her to speak in her own voice, were accessible, as were those of the second trial, which rehabilitated her character and quashed the accusations that led to her execution. Not only did Pasquier base his account squarely on these primary sources, he also incorporated crucial sections of these documents into his text. This practice of quoting documents to support historians’ claims, universal today, was controversial at the time. The classical model discouraged quoting other writers (hence the use of invented speech).

Progress in historiography is hard to establish, and there are clear cases of regress. In 17th-century France the discredited story of Trojan origins returned. Scholars in the 16th century, while not denying that God’s will might be the ultimate cause of everything, had focused entirely on secondary causes; in the following century, however, the most influential historical work was Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681; Discourse on Universal History), by the French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, which restored a providential interpretation of history.

Despite these developments, scholarly advances occurred in the study of history, most notably those made by clergymen studying medieval charters and the lives of the saints. A group of Jesuits who came to be known as the Bollandist Fathers compiled biographies of all the saints in the calendar of the Roman church—a collective task that has continued into the 21st century. The Bollandists’s scrupulously high standards of evidence and analysis has resulted in the removal from the calendar of a number of saints who had the misfortune not to have existed.

Using the results of their researches, the Bollandists challenged the authenticity of many of the charters of the Benedictine houses in France. Some of these documents were certainly forgeries, and the danger of forfeiture of the houses naturally created a demand for a method of authenticating charters. This need was met by a Benedictine of St. Maur, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), in his De re diplomatica (1681), which can be regarded as the founding work of diplomatics, or the study of charters. Mabillon’s methodology was comprehensive—he examined ink, parchment, and handwriting style and compared one charter with others. Indeed, he did his work so well that little has since been added to it.

In light of the tendentious histories of this turbulent period, the intellectual honesty and modesty of the Bollandists is refreshing. One of them wrote to Mabillon, after reading his treatise:

I have no other satisfaction in having written upon the subject than that of having given occasion for the writing of a treatise so masterly. It is true that I felt at first some pain in reading your book, where I saw myself refuted in so unanswerable a manner; but finally…seeing the truth in its clearest light, I invited my companion to come and share the admiration with which I felt myself filled.

Science and skepticism

Two new challenges confronted the study of history in the 17th century. One was generated by the successes of natural science, claimed by its proponents to be the best—or even the only—producer of truth. Science created a new picture of the world, discrediting all past conceptions. As the English poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night/ Then God said: ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” These successes inspired the hope that similar laws would be found for social and historical phenomena and that the same scientific methods could be applied to every subject, including politics, economics, and even literature.

The other challenge lay in the relativism and skepticism generated within historical discourse itself. In his Histoire des histoires et l’idée de l’histoire accompli (1599; “History of Histories and the Idea of History Accomplished”), Lancelot Voisin La Popelinière (1540–1608) asked: if history shows the ceaseless mutations of human culture, what keeps history itself from being more than a mode of perception of any particular culture, of no more permanent value than any other changeable cultural artifact? Thus, the unmasking of forgeries could lead to suspicions about every relic of the past. In a similar vein, the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin claimed that almost all the Latin and Greek classics and most of the works of the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. Jerome, were written by a group of medieval Italian scholars, who then forged all the manuscripts purporting to be earlier. Hardouin, it must be said, pushed historical criticism past the boundaries of sanity.

The most influential philosopher of the 17th century, René Descartes, included history in his catalogue of dubious sciences. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes asserted that, although histories exalt the mind,

even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least notable; and from this it follows that what is retained is not portrayed as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples which they derive from such a source are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of romances.

According to Descartes, history is doubtful because it is selective. Unlike the sciences, which are based on mathematics, history cannot yield knowledge.

One attempt to rescue the truth-claims of history, which ironically lent support to skepticism, was the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary”), by the French philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), one of the most widely read works of the 18th century. The articles in Bayle’s dictionary, enlivened by learned and often witty marginalia, established what was known about the subject but often undermined religious and political orthodoxies. These sallies were far more memorable than the often trivial facts provided in the work.

The leading historians of the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Voltaire (1694–1778), responded in different ways to the scientific impulse. In De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of Laws), Montesquieu explored the natural order that he believed underlay polities as well as economies. Despite lacking information about many cultures, he systematically applied a comparative method of analysis. Climate and soil, he believed, are the deepest level of causality. The size of the territory to be governed also determines what kind of government it can have (republics have to be small; large countries like Russia require despotism). Montesquieu’s preferred form of government was constitutionalmonarchy, which existed in France before Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) and in England during Montesquieu’s day. Among his many readers were the Founding Fathers of the United States, who embraced Montesquieu’s idea of balanced government and indeed created one exquisitely contrived to allow each branch to check the others.

Voltaire’s temperament was more skeptical. “History,” he declared, “is a pack of tricks we play on the dead.” He nevertheless spent much of his life playing those tricks, producing L’Histoire de Charles XII (1731; “History of Charles XII”), on the Swedish monarch, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; “The Century of Louis XIV”), and Essai sur les moeurs (1756; “Essay on Morals”). In an article on history for the Encyclopédie, edited by the philosopher Denis Diderot, Voltaire noted that the modern historian requires not only precise facts and dates but also attention to customs, commerce, finance, agriculture, and population. This was the program that the Essai tried to fulfill. It starts not with Adam or the Greek poet Homer but with the ancient Chinese, and it also treats Indian, Persian, and Arab civilizations. Voltaire’s Essai was the first attempt to make the genre of “universal history” truly universal, not just in covering the globe—or at least the high cultures—but also in studying every aspect of human life. In this respect Voltaire is the father of the “total histories” and the “histories of everyday life” that blossomed in the second half of the 20th century.

Voltaire was curious about everything—but not tolerant of everything. Like most philosophes (the leading thinkers of the French Enlightenment), he considered the Middle Ages an epoch of unbroken superstition and barbarism. Even the age of Louis XIV exhibited “a history of human stupidity.” Like Machiavelli, he believed that one could learn from history—but only what not to do. Thus, a statesman reading a history of the reign of Charles XII should be “cured of the folly of war.”

Although Voltaire was interested in other cultures, he believed that reason had made headway only in the Europe of his own day. It was left to thinkers of the next generation, including the baron l’Aulne Turgot (1727–81) and the marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), to construe history as gradually but inevitably moving toward the elimination of bigotry, superstition, and ignorance. Condorcet rhapsodized: “How welcome to the philosopher is this picture of the human race, freed from all its chains, released from the domination of chance and from that of the enemies of progress, advancing with a firm and sure step on the path of truth, virtue, and happiness.”

Science contributed not only its ambitions but also its concepts to historiography. The philosopher David Hume (1711–76) took from it the sober empiricism and distrust of grand schemes that informed his History of England (1754–62). The greatest of the Enlightenment historians—and probably the only one still read today—Edward Gibbon (1737–94), managed to bring together in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) the erudition of the 17th century and the philosophy of the 18th. Gibbon borrowed rather than contributed to historical erudition, for he was not a great archival researcher. “It would be unreasonable,” he said, “to expect that the historian should peruse enormous volumes, with the uncertain hope of extracting a few interesting lines.” The influence of Enlightenment thought is indicated particularly in Gibbon’s wit and in his skeptical view of religion. “To the believer,” he wrote, “all religions are equally true, to the philosopher, all religions are equally false, and to the magistrate, all religions are equally useful.”

Edward Gibbon, oil painting by Henry Walton, 1774; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

Gibbon’s great work gives no elaborate account of the causes of the decline and fall—because the causes, he thought, were obvious. Borrowing an image from physics, he wrote:

the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

The Enlightenment has been condemned as “unhistorical.” It did lack sympathy, and thus full understanding, of some cultures and periods. Hume’s view that human nature was essentially the same in the Roman Empire and in 18th-century Britain now seems wrong. No technical advances in historiography were made by the philosophes. On the other hand, history was widely read, and the brilliant writing of Voltaire and Gibbon helped to create something like a mass public for historical works. Finally, the Enlightenment expanded the historical world, in principle at least, almost to the limits recognized today—and it never shrank again.

Nevertheless, it is hard to see how historiography could have developed further within the limits established by the Enlightenment worldview. A second generation of philosophes, especially the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were already testing those limits in the later 18th century; but the most potent challenge to them came from Germany, now finally assuming its full place in the intellectual life of Europe. The period 1770–1830 witnessed the activity of an astonishing constellation of German thinkers, poets, and eventually historians, of whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich von Schiller, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are only the best known.

Perhaps even more influential than these figures, however, was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Herder was a polymath—as much a theologian, philosopher, anthropologist, or literary critic as a theorist of history. His Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit (1784–91; Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man) anticipated Darwin in its claim that all organic life is connected and evolving progressively toward human beings, the highest form of life.

Johann Gottfried von Herder, detail of an oil painting by Gerhard von Kügelgen, 1808; in the Library of Tartu State University, Estonia.Courtesy of the Library of Tartu State University

Herder held a tripartite view of historical development and was interested in what he conceived as the spirit of cultures. He posited an age of primitive human poets whose consciousness was distilled in epics. An age of prose followed as humans became mature, but it was only in the “ripe” age—inevitably metaphorically associated with senescence—that language became precise enough to be suitable for philosophical reflection.

The same preoccupation with language underlies Herder’s thoughts about culture—or Volk, as he called it. Within a culture’s language, he wrote, “dwell its entire world of tradition, history, religion, principles of existence: its whole heart and soul.” The language of a Volk is created in its youth or poetic age; afterward it is relatively resistant to changes imposed from the outside. Herder resisted the notion that any age or Volk is inferior to any other.

It is not hard to detect a German declaration of independence in these views. “Germany,” after all, was a cultural but not a political unity. The exaltation of all cultures as equal and the admiration for “primitive” humans stood in contrast to French cultural chauvinism and the grading of people according to how closely they reached the Enlightenment standard of rationality. Furthermore, Herder turned the interests of historians away from political and diplomatic history and toward social, cultural, and intellectual history.

Even more profoundly, Herder elevated the historical imagination to supreme importance. This did not mean that he favoured fantasy, the invention of speeches, or other deliberate falsifications. But he thought that the spiritual development of a people cannot be discerned by purely rational processes. The ways in which the art of a people, for example, is related to its economic or social institutions has to be grasped in an act of insight. An impressionistic thinker, Herder sensed the aspects of the Enlightenment that his generation found unsatisfying. He is generally regarded as the father of Romanticism.

During the Romantic movements, thinkers reevaluated past thought and looked for what might be usable in it. This process led to the discovery by the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) of the eccentricScienza nuova (1725; “New Science”) of the Neapolitan professor of rhetoric Giambattista Vico (1688–1744). Much of the Scienza nuova deals with problems in the history of Roman law (which had preoccupied 16th- and 17th-century scholars), but it also proposes a new methodology for history, a scheme of how it develops, and a reformulation of the providential theory.

In opposition to the philosophy of Descartes, Vico argued that only history can produce certainty. According to Vico, humans can have knowledge of “the world of nations” because they created it, but only God can know the natural world. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had equated verum (“truth”) and factum (“the made”), but Vico made this a fundamental principle of historiography, one that he hoped would make it the queen of the sciences.

One problem for Vico, which he says took him many years of effort to solve, was that of the nature of primitive mentality. In opposition to “the conceit of scholars”—the assumption that primitive humans must have had worldviews and mental processes like those of the Enlightenment—Vico held that the authors of the Iliad, the ancient Greek poem attributed to Homer, were individuals of powerful imaginations who could express themselves only through poetic metaphors. Among these metaphors was Zeus, the god who throws down thunderbolts, and his equivalent in every other gentile culture. This age of gods was succeeded by an age of heroes and finally by an age of men, whose characteristic expression was prose and whose inevitable trope was irony.

Vico and Herder worked toward a conception of “spirit of the times” and “spirit of the people,” both of which were incorporated into Hegel’s enormously ambitious philosophy of history. Hegel’s thought eludes easy summation, and its premises are not intuitively obvious. As an absolute idealist, he held that only ideas are real (in Hegel’s famous phrase, “the real is rational”). Ideas develop by contradiction, or by implying their opposites, since establishing what a concept is involves determining what it is not. Thus, pure being implies not-being; but since it is pure being, it is not anything in particular, and hence it is also a kind of nothingness. From the ideas of pure being and nothingness the idea of becoming is inevitably generated. This is one example of what is usually called (though seldom by Hegel) dialectic. The Idea, or Spirit, for Hegel must realize itself by being incarnated in the world—in inorganic, animal, and vegetable life because they obey natural laws, and in human history because “World history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, just as Nature is the development of the Idea in Space.”

The goal toward which Spirit was working, in Hegel’s conception, was the state—not any state existing in his time but a constitutional organization guaranteeing freedom to all citizens. The journey of Spirit began in China, which had grasped the idea that one person (the emperor) was free; but freedom for only one person is in fact license for him and despotism for everyone else. Thus, the unfolding idea of freedom leads to the idea that, unless everyone is free, “freedom” will have no meaning. Yet freedom without limits is also self-contradictory (one person’s freedom to swing his arms must be limited by the freedom of others not to be hit in the face). Thus, a structure of laws guarantees freedom rather than abridges it.

Hegel’s philosophy of history was full of original and profound insights into the histories of China, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the “Germanic world” (though it also included some dubious claims, especially about Africa). Although his most famous follower was Karl Marx (see belowMarxist historiography), his influence was felt by many others as well. Many 19th-century historians who were not direct disciples of Hegel were nevertheless idealists of some sort; they focused on the cultures created by peoples and believed that the study of history used distinctive methods and was radically different from, but not inferior to, natural science.

Jules Michelet is the archetypal Romantic historian. He had a conventionally successful academic career at the Collège de France until he was dismissed in 1851 for refusing to take an oath to Louis Napoleon, president of France and soon emperor of the French. “Academic,” however, would be the least appropriate description of Michelet’s histories. Michelet took an almost sensual pleasure in entering “catacombs of manuscripts, this wonderful necropolis of national monuments” whose contents were “not papers, but lives of men, of provinces, of people.” What he did with the documents, however, was quite different. Distinguishing himself from two contemporaries, François Guizot and Augustin Thierry (he could have added the great German historian Leopold von Ranke), Michelet commented: “Guizot analyzes, Thierry narrates, I resurrect!”

Jules Michelet, detail of an oil painting by Thomas Couture; in the Carnavalet Museum, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

In his effort to bring the past, in all its variety, back to life, Michelet did not hesitate to consult the people of his time: “I shut the books, and placed myself among the people to the best of my power; the lonely writer plunged again into the crowd, listened to their noise, noted their words.” The people were France, the object of Michelet’s passion. Through all the vicissitudes of its history, they remained its quasi-mystical essence; and Michelet exhorted them to retain their sense of national unity.

Romanticism crossed the English Channel, though naturally with variations, and it also crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) proclaimed that the central theme of English history from the time of the granting of the Magna Carta in 1215 to his own day involved the gradual increase of liberty. His History of England from the Accession of James II (1849–61) situated the genius of the English in achieving liberty by largely peaceful means, thus sparing himself the task of accounting for England’s medieval regicides or the English Civil Wars. The English had enough respect for the past to avoid violent change but enough flexibility to avoid rigid conservatism. In the first volume, Macaulay wrote a classic description of English life in 1685. His picture of England was highly pleasing to 19th-century Victorians, who bought hundreds of thousands of copies.

More directly influenced by Romanticism, as by German thought, was Thomas Carlyle. To him, Macaulay’s views, besides being complacent, were insipid. Conflicts between peoples and the actions of great men were the stuff of history. “Universal History,” he declared in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), “… is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones,” and history was “the essence of innumerable biographies.”

The works of many Romantic historians were notable for their literary style. More people, however, derived their sense of the past from the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). Ranke’s career as a modern historian began when he discovered factual errors in Scott’s novels; Scott was also Marx’s favourite novelist. The emphasis the Romantics put on imagination in recreating the past opened the way for the genre of historical novels, of which Scott was the first great practitioner.

The most influential American historian of the 19th century was George Bancroft (1800–91), who studied at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin (see belowJohann Christoph Gatterer and the Göttingen scholars). During intervals in a busy career as a public official he wrote a 10-volume History of the United States (1834–74), which placed the country within God’s plan for all humanity. The European colonists who settled the country brought with them the “vital principles of Teutonic liberty.” With the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “a new plebeian democracy took its place by the side of the proudest empire,” a democracy that was destined to spread the blessings of liberty to the rest of the world. As to spreading the blessings of liberty to American slaves, Bancroft argued that slavery was imposed on the United States and that it played a role in the providential plan. The resonance within his work not only of Romantic principles (it can be seen as an adaptation of Hegel) but also American political rhetoric of the 19th century explains its wide appeal.

Other American historians, such as Francis Parkman (1823–93), William Prescott (1796–1859), and John Lothrop Motley (1814–77), also addressed epic themes in captivating language. Parkman’s theme was the contest between France, Britain, and the Native Americans for possession of North America. Prescott and Motley recounted the wars of imperial Spain in the Golden Age of the 16th and 17th centuries. Prescott’s theme was the conquest of Mexico and Peru; Motley (also a product of Göttingen and Berlin) recounted the successful rebellion of the Netherlands, which he did not fail to compare frequently to the American Revolution.

History becomes academic

Johann Christoph Gatterer and the Göttingen scholars

Until the beginning of the 19th century, the history of historiography could be represented in a list of great and near-great individuals. Group efforts like those of the Bollandists or the Benedictines of St. Maur were the exception; almost all historians worked alone. History had no established place in most university curricula, being subsumed under rhetoric (or occasionally grammar) and studied mainly in faculties of law or theology. The universities, too, lacked intellectual vitality; Gibbon called the 14 months he spent at Oxford the most idle and unprofitable of his life. In Germany, where universities had always been more influential (almost all the great figures in German intellectual life had doctoral degrees), the characteristic institutional structure of contemporary historiography was being established.

The centre of this activity was the university at Göttingen, in the electorate of Hannover. The electorate was ruled by the Hannoverian kings of England (George I through William IV), who, whether from tolerance or inattentiveness, allowed greater freedom of thought than did rulers in other parts of Germany. As a new university (founded 1737), Göttingen was less bound by traditional academic divisions, and it soon devoted itself especially to law and history rather than to philosophy or theology. Its rise to prominence began with the appointment in 1759 of Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99) to the chair of history. One of the first scholars to be interested in the history of historiography, Gatterer understood the institutional support that the new academic discipline would require. By 1763 the library of the university had grown to 200,000 volumes, making it one of the largest in Germany.

One of Gatterer’s most important projects was a critical edition of sources for the study of German history, which ultimately came to fruition in the collection known as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (“Historical Monuments of the Germans”). He also founded two historical journals (by 1791 there were 131 mainly historical journals in Germany) and a Historical Institute, an early type of seminar.

The scholars of Göttingen shared some of the philosophical interests of Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu’s empirical approach to law and politics. One of the Göttingen professors, for example, lectured on what he called Statistik, which at first was the study of mostly qualitative data about states but soon came to resemble modern statistics as numerical data became more widely available. What was most important about the Göttingen scholars was that they described states as they were rather than fantasizing about how they might have been.

Soon other German universities became centres of advanced historical research. This was particularly true of Berlin, which was the site of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (founded 1700) and the Humboldt University of Berlin (founded 1809–10), both of which attracted great scholars from all over the country.

The name that will always be associated with the latter institution, however, is that of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who taught there for 37 years. His written works were only one avenue of his influence on 19th-century historiography. Ranke was an obscure Gymnasium (a state-run secondary school) teacher when, at the age of 29, he published Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824; History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514). In the preface to the work he famously stated that, although history has been assigned the task of judging the past and giving lessons for the future, his work “will merely show how it actually was (wie es eigentlich gewesen).” The second volume, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber (“Critique of Modern Historians”), established critical methods of historical scholarship that have since become normative. Ranke emphasized the acquisition of first-hand information and the tireless search for all relevant data, which he defined as “memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies, and original narratives of eyewitnesses.” He cited Guicciardini as an example of faulty historiographical practice, demonstrating that he invented the content of many reported speeches, that he could not have had any personal knowledge of many events about which he wrote, and that, even when he did have personal knowledge, he often copied from contemporary accounts.

Interestingly, Ranke’s list of sources of relevant data omits what present-day historians would consider the most obvious and valuable source: state papers (the documents produced by public officials in performing official actions). Such documents were not generally available to historians when Ranke started to write, but, as a result of pressure from the growing historical profession, more and more archives were opened to them.

Shortly after Ranke’s book was published, he was called to Berlin. He would have won no awards for lecturing, however. One of the many Americans drawn to the new temple of historical research described him as “a little round-faced man, with a baldish forehead, a high voice and thin hair.” He “jerked out” his observations “like a garden fountain which keeps spurting up little futile jets and then stopping.” But it was his seminars that established his influence. Modeled on seminars in philology and Greek literature that Ranke had attended as a student, they offered a “laboratory” in historical method in which problems were posed, documents sought out and produced, and mutual criticism offered.

More than 100 historians passed through Ranke’s seminar, including Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Ranke’s students established seminars of their own, and their hundreds of pupils were also disciples of Ranke. When Gabriel Monod (1844–1912), who would become one of the leading French historians of his generation, asked the great Hippolyte Taine (1828–92) whether he should go to Germany to study history, Taine answered yes. The Germans’ superiority, he said, rested on two bases. They were philologists who went straight to original documents, but they were also philosophers, which gave them “the habit of generalizing and of seeing objects in masses.”

Although Ranke has been regarded as a positivist who was concerned only with facts, the very intensity of his preoccupation with ascertaining those facts came from his conviction that history was, as he wrote, a “holy hieroglyph.” He was as convinced as any medieval monk that history was the unfolding of a divine plan; for him, however, the plan required the existence of modern European nation-states. States, he wrote, were “thoughts of God”; by intuiting the idea or cultural principle incarnated in each nation, the historian could discern at least intimations of the divine plan. Accordingly, much of Ranke’s own scholarship focused on the inner workings of the nation-states and their relationships with each other; for this his exploitation of the relazioni, or reports, of astute Venetian diplomats was especially important.

The conclusion of his life’s work, however, was an unfinished universal history, published in nine volumes between 1881 and 1888. In an age of rampant nationalism, to which Ranke’s histories had certainly contributed, his final legacy was a sort of cosmopolitanism.

New histories

Although Ranke’s influence was enhanced by his longevity (he lived to the age of 91), it was mainly due to the seductive synthesis he offered. He maintained that scholarship could produce historical truth; he held a conception of the divine will that linked it to the existing nation-states of 19th-century Europe; and he possessed a considerable literary gift. Even in Germany, however, his sway was never absolute, and by the end of the century his style of history was under assault from a number of directions.

Ranke’s philosophy of history, which he usually articulated in prefaces or asides, was examined by Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–84) in a series of lectures eventually published as the Historik. Droysen maintained that Ranke’s critical method and literary virtuosity had created an aura of scientific accuracy that shielded his faulty theistic interpretations. Rather than focusing on a core of ascertainable facts, however, Droysen emphasized how the same set of facts could be accounted for in different ways. The French Revolution, for example, could be the subject of at least four forms of discourse: investigative, narrative, didactic, and discussive (mixtures of these being found in most historical works). Of these, Droysen favoured the discussive, because it was explicitly addressed to the relevance that historical knowledge might have to society. The past is inaccessible except through its “remains,” which can be interpreted pragmatically, focusing on the aims of the actors in historical events; conditionally, stressing the material conditions under which actions take place; psychologically, comprising both character types and the element of individual personality and will; or ethically, contemplating the events under moral categories. By drawing attention to representative practices, by conceiving history as a discourse, and by arguing that no historian could give an unmediated account of “how it actually was,” Droysen undercut the foundations on which Ranke’s work rested, though this was all but unrecognized at the time.

Another attack came from those who believed that history should model itself after the natural sciences, especially physics. In their view, the reliance on intuition ensured that historiography would always be imprecise. Such critics also believed that the invocation of notions such as Spirit, Volk, or God was a mere mystification and that the focus on the individual or the particular rather than the general was misguided. Although very few historians fully embraced this position, some had ambitions in that direction. Among them was Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), whose 12-volume Deutsche Geschichte (1891–1901: “German History”) elicited a furious response from historians in Germany. Lamprecht’s transgressions were two-fold: he criticized the prevailing idealist approach to history, and he made social and cultural life, rather than the formation of the state, the central theme. His opponents accused him of having socialist sympathies (which was doubtful) and of attempting to undo the tradition of historiography that had made Germany admired throughout the world. Lamprecht sought to find laws of collective psychology governing the behaviour of Germans. His approach found few followers in Germany but had somewhat more influence in the United States. It was in any case a symptom of a widespread desire to find a different and more scientific basis for history.

The most important voices calling for a new scientific history were heard in France and the United States. France had its own tradition of documentary criticism, stemming from the humanist scholars of the 16th century and stimulated by the founding of the École des Chartes (School of Paleography) in 1821. More resistant to German influence than any other European country, it also produced Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the prophet of scientific laws in history.

Comte, inventor of the word sociology and often regarded as the founder of the discipline, propounded an elaborate tripartite view of historical development. Humanity, he declared, had already passed through two stages, the theological and the philosophical. In the former, divinities or spiritual forces were believed to be the causes of natural and human events. In the philosophical period, natural laws were discovered, but the world of human events was still held to be indeterminate, and thought was confused by the belief in essences, teleologies, and other unobservable forces. The advent of the positive period was the French Revolution, which liberated humans from their theological fancies and philosophical mistakes. Henceforth, Comte prophesied, humans would rely only on what their senses told them and would seek out the laws that governed the human world. The aggregate of these laws would be sociology. Observations would be provided by historians; but historians, incapable of fully understanding their own discoveries, would rely on sociologists to place their observations under appropriate laws. This program, not surprisingly, did not appeal to historians, but it did offer an ideal for uniting all aspects of society in a single analytical framework.

In 1900 the French philosopher Henri Berr founded the social-science journal Revue de Synthèse Historique, which attracted contributions from some French historians. Berr’s program for “historical synthesis” was more ambitious than any single historian could achieve; he called for teams of scholars from various disciplines to engage in empirical historical research with the aim of synthesizing their discoveries. Berr argued that no discipline could proceed without some sort of logical method that would involve hypothesis and synthesis as well as analysis. In this respect he agreed with the leading figure in French social science, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who established the journal L’Année Sociologique at about the same time. Although many French historians remained more traditional in their practice, Berr in 1907 recruited both Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1866–1944) as collaborators on the Revue. Together these men would challenge and revolutionize the study of history in France and in the rest of the world.

While at the University of Strasbourg, which then was on the margins of the French historical profession, Bloch and Febvre produced important works of their own, often focused on what became known as the history of mentalités, or popular attitudes and unconscious preconceptions. Although both eventually attained chairs at universities in Paris, it was not until after World War II that they achieved a significant following—by then Bloch had been shot by the Nazis for his participation in the French resistance. After the war, the Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, which they had founded in 1929 as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, became the most influential historical journal in the world (the title was changed again in 1994, to Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales). Its impact was vastly enhanced by the capture by the Annalistes of the newly reconstituted Sixth Section of the École des Hautes Études (School of Higher Studies). Eventually, as a result of bureaucratic centralization in France and the willingness of the government to commit funds to higher education in order to gain cultural prestige, the directorate of the Sixth Section was virtually able to supervise historical research in the country.

Whereas in 1875 there was hardly anything that could be called a historical profession in the United States, by 1900 the American Historical Association (AHA) and its journal, the American Historical Review, as well as a number of university Ph.D. programs in history, had been established. No clique of senior professors in the great universities could have achieved the sort of dominance in the United States that was possible in France or Germany, but there was nevertheless a struggle to create a group of historians, highly trained in the approved German manner, to claim the national history from the hands of the great amateurs such as Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman. For a while amateurs coexisted amicably with the professionals (Bancroft was the second president of the AHA), but they soon withdrew to found more-congenial forums such as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now the Journal of American History). This prompted former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, who served as president of the AHA in 1912, to complain, not without reason, that the professionals were squeezing all the life out of history; their expertise was bought at the cost of pedantry in the profession and boredom among the public.

As they professionalized the teaching and writing of history, the new academic historians sought to dislodge the picture of the American past that had been painted by their predecessors. The first shock occurred in 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) delivered a paper on his “frontier thesis.” Whereas Bancroft and most other leading historians of his generation had claimed that the early settlers of New England brought with them the germs of “Teutonic liberty,” Turner—inspired by the announcement of the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890 that the western frontier was now “closed” (or entirely occupied)—declared that the decisive experience in American history had been that of pioneers as they pressed westward, settling the “empty” frontier. On the frontier, he declared, Americans developed their most distinctive characteristics: egalitarianism, self-help, and pragmatism.

Frederick Jackson Turner.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Few important historical writings have ever rested on such a slender empirical basis. The “emptiness” of the frontier was an illusion created by the Census Bureau, which made no count of the Native Americans who inhabited these lands. Although the frontier thesis had been anticipated by Hegel, Turner’s genius lay in bringing it forward at just the right time. The closing of the frontier did mark the end of a readily understandable period in American history.

Turner not only introduced a new conception of American history but also wrested the historical spotlight from Harvard and New England and shone it on his native Wisconsin and points west. His book The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), emphasized the importance of sectional conflict and demonstrated how cultural traits interacted with the natural environment; he thus achieved his goal of making history not just “the brilliant annals of the few” but also the story of “the degraded tillers of the soil, toiling that others might dream.”

A generation of Turner’s younger contemporaries, most notably Charles Beard (1874–1948), Carl Becker (1873–1945), and James Harvey Robinson (1863–1936), issued the first of many calls in the 20th century for a “new history.” Although there was actually little novelty in the methods they advocated, they all aspired, like Turner, to reinterpret American history in the interest of a more democratic and rational society.

different degrees and kinds of property inevitably exist in modern society; party doctrines and ‘principles’ originate in the sentiments and views which the possession of various kinds of property creates in the minds of the possessors; class and group divisions based on property lie at the basis of modern government; and politics and constitutional law are inevitably a reflex of these contending interests.

Beard neatly expressed his reinterpretation of the American Revolution by saying that it concerned the issue not just of home rule but of who should rule at home.

These historians, who were generally Progressives in politics, emphasized the importance of class conflict and the power of economic interests in their studies, revealing the influence of Karl Marx (1818–83). Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) worked together in almost total isolation, and when Marx died it would have been difficult for a casual observer not to conclude that his ideas would disappear with him. By 1900, however, Marxism constituted the greatest challenge to the idealist tradition.

Despite the influence of philosophy, sociology, and economics, Marx’s thought was profoundly historical. Hegel had taught him that history was constant change, produced by oppositions, reconciliations, and more oppositions. Acknowledging (in a way) this debt, Marx remarked that he found Hegel standing on his head and turned him right side up again. By this he meant that Hegel had mistaken the real motor of history: it was not the conflict of ideas but the conflict of social classes. Marx admitted, however, that this was not his own discovery; the “bourgeois” historians, such as Vico, had anticipated him. What Marx brought to the idea of class struggle was a conception of how it had developed and how it must eventually turn out.

Marx’s understanding of class struggle was influenced by the work of the English economist David Ricardo (1772–1823), who had developed a model of how “perfect” markets work in a capitalist mode of production. Ricardo had made the conflicting interests of landlords, employers, and workers the centre of his picture of the economy. He argued that, because of Malthusian population dynamics, the wages of workers would always be held at or near subsistence levels. Marx extended the analysis by taking into account increases in population and in the productive powers of the economy. He correctly predicted—at a time when there were very few companies that employed more than 50 workers—that the size of capitalist enterprises would inexorably increase until giant corporations dominated the economy. Equally correctly, he predicted that the proportion of the labour force engaged in agriculture (over half in parts of Europe) and the number of small business owners would sharply decline, so that proletarians—those who had nothing to sell but their labour—would become the overwhelming majority of the population. Marx was less certain about the political consequences of these changes; by the end of his life he thought that capitalism might be brought to an end without violent revolution in some countries (the United States among them), and he saw that not all societies would pass through exactly the same sequence of changes. But he never lost his confidence that the system of private ownership of the means of production, in which enormous quantities of wealth accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, would inevitably be replaced by socialism.

None of this is history, properly speaking. The appeal of Marxism, for some historians, has been the rigour of this economic argument, which promises an eventual system based on moral precepts more appealing than “greed is good”; they also have been attracted to its suggestive implications for a unified approach to history. These are implications only, however. Marxist historiography, as a contemporary Marxist once said, is still “under construction.” Marx’s own historical writings are far from a mechanical application of his system. In his brilliant Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon (1852; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), several classes, not just two, played important roles, and the political skill of Napoleon III is acknowledged—albeit grudgingly—as significant. Although some Marxist historians may still maintain a residual allegiance to the notion that ideas are a mere “superstructural” reflection of the material “base,” the way this relationship is supposed to work has never been satisfactorily demonstrated, and this aspect of Marxism has largely been laid aside.

In recent times the idea has gained currency that Marxism has been “refuted by history.” No successful revolution has broken out in any advanced capitalist country, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of the regimes in eastern Europe that called themselves Marxist has been taken as the conclusive demonstration that Marx was wrong. But “history” refutes nobody; only historians can do that, and other historians, looking at different evidence or reinterpreting the same, can in turn refute them. A more well-grounded objection might be that there is no way to refute Marx, because his predictions are insufficiently precise; for example, he wrote that no mode of production gives way to its successor before it has exhausted all of its possibilities. The history of historiography suggests, however, that no grand scheme, whether of Augustine, Hegel, or Marx, can be “disconfirmed” by empirical evidence. They are different interpretations of history, more or less persuasive as one judges them on what are essentially aesthetic or moral grounds. The option to refuse to interpret in such a mode is of course always open.

Contemporary historiography

The extraordinary expansion of higher education throughout the world in the first decades after World War II, and the prominent place that instruction in history occupied in colleges and universities, contributed to the dramatic growth in the historical profession in the second half of the 20th century. This in turn reflected a widespread public interest in—indeed, a fascination with—the past.

In the countries that fought in the war, especially the United States, returning veterans were given access to higher education. This created a mass market for teachers of history, again, especially in the United States, where it became common to inculcate in first-year students, under the rubric of “general education,” courses in “Western civilization.” (This was quickly and appropriately nicknamed “Plato to NATO”; its premise was that there was a continuous and relatively coherent Western tradition beginning in classical Greece and mutually enjoyed by the countries that happened to be members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.) With so many more people studying history, publishers in the English speaking world began to produce cheap paperback editions even of historical monographs, making it possible for the first time to introduce undergraduates to real historical writing.

Borne on this tide were the graduate schools, which expanded their faculties and admitted Ph.D. candidates in numbers not seen before. Good doctoral dissertations (and even some bad ones) could attract the interest of publishers, and their authors usually had some choice of permanent employment. The buoyant publishing climate also encouraged historical journals to proliferate. None matched the impact of the Annales, but they often moved to the cutting edge of historical work. Past and Present was founded in 1952 at the University of Oxford with the provocative (but short-lived) subtitle “A Journal of Scientific History.” Although committed to social history and drawing mainly on left-wing contributors, the journal never followed any rigid ideological line, and it quickly became the outstanding historical journal in English, rivaling the staid and traditional English Historical Review (founded 1885). Similar interests were addressed by Comparative Studies in Society and History (founded 1958) and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (founded 1970), while History and Theory (founded 1960) became the first journal devoted to the theory of history.